15. FKipCŚ: Stanley Łopuszyński: East is worth the West. Cycling through Europe

As part of the Festival of Cultures and Travel CURIOUS OF THE WORLD, we invite you to a presentation

Stanley Lopuszyński: The East is worth the West. Cycling through Europe

October 24, 2026, 5:00 p.m.

Forum Cinema, 5 Legionowa Street

ticket: 25 zł

How to combine touring with traveling thousands of kilometers on a bicycle? How to plan a tour through several countries, transport an instrument, find a place for a concert and at the same time leave space for what cannot be planned?

Stanisław “Stanley” Łopuszyński will talk about his Zamosć-Odessa Tour 2021, Białystok-Tallinn Tour 2023, Krakow-Istanbul Tour 2024 and Wroclaw-Rome Tour 2025, as well as his travels in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Turkey or Egypt. It will be about planning routes, organizing concerts, transporting an instrument, the weather and situations that cannot be foreseen. There will be plenty of stories of chance encounters, unexpected adventures and the search for Polish traces in the places visited. The meeting will also have an artistic element, because there will be a piano on the stage.

The meeting will be a story of travel, in which music sets the direction, and the most interesting stories often begin where the planned route ends.

Stanisław “Stanley” Łopuszyński — musician, cultural manager, traveler and organizer of international artistic expeditions. For years, he has combined his two greatest passions — music and travel — to create projects in which the road becomes a way of getting to know people, history and cultures. He travels both in Europe and beyond. He visited, among others, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Moldova, Kazakhstan, the United States and Egypt. A special place in his travels is occupied by expeditions, during which artistic activity is combined with traveling through other countries and direct encounter with local communities.

His hallmark has become bike tours. The first of these was the realized Zamosć-Odessa Tour 2021 — an expedition through Poland, Ukraine and Moldova, including Transnistria, during which he played a series of free recitals and concerts, traveling the route from Zamość to Odessa on a bicycle. The project became the beginning of a cycle of journeys combining music, sport, history, tourism and meeting people. In 2023, he completed the Białystok—Tallinn Tour 2023 — a more than 1300-kilometer, 23-day trip through Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. On the tour there were concerts in other cities and towns, including Białystok, Augustów, Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn. In 2024, he held the Krakow—Istanbul Tour 2024 — nearly 2,200 kilometers across seven countries and two continents. The route ran through Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey, and piano and harpsichord concerts were held in the visited towns. In 2025, he completed another major expedition — Wroclaw-Rome Tour 2025, leading through Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.

Kazakhstan and Central Asia, to which he plans to return, are also an important chapter of his travel activity. Łopuszyński made musical trips and concert tours there, reaching not only large centers, but also places related to the Polish community, sent to these areas since 1936. Kazakhstan is a particularly interesting space for him because of the country's multicultural history and traces of Polish presence.

Travelling is also a way for him to discover Polish cultural heritage. Of particular importance is Ukraine, where he combines interest in the history of the former Borderlands with artistic and social activities. It was there that the Jazzloviec Festival was founded, combining the Renaissance music of Mikołaj Gomółka with jazz and becoming a space for the meeting of Polish and Ukrainian cultures. Since 2022, Lopuszyński travels around Ukraine also as a driver and participant of humanitarian convoys. There he covered tens of thousands of kilometers, reaching, among others, Kiev, Kharkov, Dnieper, Zaporozhye, Kherson and Donbass towns — Severodonetsk, Bachmut, Chasiv Yar, Soledar, Seversk, transporting humanitarian aid and participating in the evacuation of the civilian population.

So his travels are more than moving from point A to point B. They are a way of learning about the world through people, music, history and places. The bicycle, the harpsichord, the piano and the road have become distinctive elements of his business — allowing him to reach places where music becomes an excuse to meet, talk and discover local history.